First image of Mercury from Messenger reaches Earth

A couple of weeks ago NASA reached a milestone and sighed with relief when its Messenger probe successfully managed to enter an orbit of Mercury. 6.5 years of work did not end in disaster, and NASA was quick to start testing everything still worked.

In fact, that testing was meant to continue until April 3rd, but it looks as though things are moving more quickly than planned as the first image of Mercury from Messenger has now reached Earth and NASA has been kind enough to share it with everyone.

This is the first image ever obtained from a spacecraft orbiting Mercury, and was captured at 5:20am on March 29th. In total a batch of 363 images were captured over a 6 hour period and transmitted back to Earth. NASA scientists are currently pouring over the data as each image arrives. At 2pm EDT today there’s a NASA media teleconference where we are sure to get more information and see more images of the planet.

Even this first image includes a section near Mercury’s south pole never seen before on camera and there’s sure to be a lot more such images helping us to unlock the planet’s mysteries. We also get to see the large Debussy and smaller Matabei craters in a lot more detail. And although 363 images have already been taken, NASA is expecting 1,185 more by April 4th, and a total of 75,000 images by April 2012.